


It never rains...

by pprfaith



Series: Micro Wishlist 2019 [2]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Community: wishlist_fic, F/M, Humor, I am ignoring everything past Civil War and making up my own shit, Making Friends, Not Beta Read, Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Prompt Fic, Stranded on an Island Trope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 00:34:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21888283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: ... on lonely, pink desert islands, stranded with grumpy gods.
Relationships: Loki (Marvel) & Buffy Summers, Loki (Marvel)/Buffy Summers
Series: Micro Wishlist 2019 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1576723
Comments: 14
Kudos: 261





	It never rains...

**Author's Note:**

> For peaceful-fury, who asked for Buffy/Loki and 'At least it's sunny'. It got away from me. I hope you enjoy it and thank you, so much, for being such an amazing person.

+

New York is being attacked by aliens coming from deadly portals. 

Again. 

Buffy got a call from Stephen Strange, who got a call from Iron Man, saying that there were random portals opening all over the city, some opening to picturesque landscapes, some to oceans spewing water, some to places filled with monsters, demons and aliens. 

All of New York is being flooded (sometimes literally) by what’s on the far side of the randomly opening portals and the extended Avengers couldn’t keep up. 

Enter Team Slayer. 

So here Buffy is, kicking ass and taking names, she and her squad of twelve girls running from portal to portal. That part’s the easy part – mostly, they just follow the screams.

She leaps over an upturned car, swings her sword onto the half-snake, half-dragon thing that came out of the nearest portal and then throws one of the nifty little bombs Willow and Dawnie cooked up into the undulating, pulsating, black-as-pitch portal. 

It bulges once, then collapses into itself, closing rapidly. 

“Reality bomb,” Vi breathes reverently where she’s chopping up another of the beasties, her nerd-heart obviously content. Buffy rolls her eyes and starts loping down the street to where the heart of the battle is. She’s pretty sure one of the smart people around would call her nuts for saying it, but she’s almost positive that the portals are congregating on where the threat to them comes from. 

She quickly veers off to help a few civilians barricade the door to a coffee shop, inside of which something very orc-like is smashing the shit out of the furniture. It’s throwing the broken bits into the portal by the coffee machine. Once they’re done, she tells the civilians to get underground. Buildings aren’t safe because the portals open inside of them, but so far, none have popped up underground. 

They scoot and she continues to make her way to where the portals are definitely, absolutely congregating. 

Someone’s aiming them, she’s sure. Someone’s behind this whole thing, even if it seems to have taken on a life of its own. 

Oh no, an evil scheme that went out of control. What a shocking, unexpected turn! Color her entirely unsurprised. Demons, villains. It’s always the same.

Iron Man, Thor, the Wasp and Captain Marvel are providing air cover and one block down from Buffy’s current, Stephen and Loki (of all freaking people) are preparing a spell to force all the portals shut at once. And the portals _don’t like that_. 

She just hopes their spell works. She only has three of her twenty bombs left and she knows the rest of her squad is equally out of ammo. They’ve been at this for almost an hour now, portals springing up faster and faster as the spell progressed. 

Something about them being like a virus and as long as a single one survives, they will multiply again and again and so they all have to be shut down in the same instant. Thus the long prep-time for the spell. It needs to charge. After that, the briefing devolved into mumbo-jumbo and Buffy stopped listening. She’s only here to be muscle. 

And muscle says she needs to get closer to their spell casters, because the spell should be almost ready and the portals are _aiming_ now. Even the fliers have noticed and are starting to abandon the outlying targets in favor of heading back in, providing assistance from above. 

She gives a sharp whistle and picks up speed, girls falling in around her as their own fights permit.

In the middle of an intersection, Loki and Stephen stand inside a circle, Stephen chanting and gesturing while Loki mostly keeps feeding him power. Apparently, gods are pretty awesome batteries. Who knew?

Buffy uses the last of her reality bombs to shut three portals in rapid succession, never losing speed as she chops up something that looks like it escaped from a Doctor Who set, only with more teeth. Iron Man goes on a strafing run right next to her, protecting her nine o’clock from something slimy and angry. 

Then she sees it. 

The portals are _absolutely_ going for the kill and she shouts something along those lines into her comms, because half a dozen of them have suddenly popped into existence around Stephen and Loki’s protective circle.

One of them is spewing some sort of viscous greenish liquid which Buffy can already tell is going to wash away the chalk-and-salt circle at any moment. Two portals seem inert. All the others are spewing angry natives. 

One of them spits out a troll the size of Anya’s former beau, hammer swinging, lunging directly for Loki. 

Buffy doesn’t think. 

She drops her sword, takes a running leap, hopes the spell is done enough for Stephen to finish without his battery and tackles Loki out of the way of the troll’s downward swing at the last possible second, sending them both skidding into one of the inert portals. 

This is why she hates working with superheroes.

Then, blackness. 

+

She wakes up coughing water. 

Which means she’s alive. 

So far so good. 

She coughs some more, waits until her lungs crawl back down into her ribcage and then sits up. 

She’s on a beach. It’s pale gold. The forest in front of her is pink. The ocean she’s sitting in is green. 

She wonders if there’s shrimp here. 

Beside her, an acerbic voice announce, “Oh, you’re not dead. Fantastic.”

Loki doesn’t sound like he finds it fantastic at all. He’s wet, pale and looks like he hasn’t slept in a month, which is weird, because he didn’t look like that at the briefing. 

He also looks royally pissed.

Buffy gives a little fist pump. “Yay team.”

If looks could kill, she’d be dead. Again. “We’re stranded on an empty island in an alternate dimension. The portal closed behind us, as per the climax of the spell, and I am magically depleted enough that I will not be able to cast any magic for the foreseeable future – all thanks to your brutish desire to tackle me into an unstable portal to the far reaches of the universe. Yay team indeed.”

Wow. If he could bottle and sell that sarcasm, puppies all over would die and kittens would weep.

The fact that he’d be god paste under a troll hammer if she hasn’t interfered apparently either hasn’t registered yet, or he’d have preferred it. 

Buffy shrugs, blithely, just because she can tell it’s going to piss him off majorly. “At least it’s sunny?”

+

Shortly after her attempt at optimism, Loki stomps off into the bushes, muttering about mortals and water and getting eaten by bugs and possibly something about cannibalism looking very attractive right now. Is it cannibalism if they aren’t, technically, the same species? 

Last Buffy checked, she wasn’t a god. 

Buffy sits in the surf a bit longer and then gets up as well. He’s not wrong about the water. 

And if they’ll be here for a while, well. 

Food, too, probably. Eugh. She’ll have to kill some critters and _eat them_ , won’t she?

+

Buffy stares. 

Dinner stares back.

It’s small, sort of purple-ish, with four legs, a curled tail and eyes the size of its entire face. It looks reptilian, but feels fuzzy to the touch, like a peach. She’s killed four of them with her boot knife. 

She thinks the next step is skinning them. She hopes they’re not, like venomous. No, wait. That’s poisonous, right? If she plans to stick it into her own mouth, it’ poison.

She has never skinned a thing in her life. Flashes of Warren, strung up between those trees dance behind her eyes. 

She’s going to hurl.

“At least it’s sunny,” Loki mocks, razor sharp from across the clearing. By the sound of it, pseudo-cannibalism is still on the table. 

Buffy gags and flips him off. 

+

Loki ends up skinning their dinner with a single cut and a sharp yank, separating meat from pelt. It’s gross, and that’s _before_ he guts the small animals.

To distract herself, she muses on what to call them. “I think I’ll call them Barneys. Because of the color. And they’re sort of… dino-ish. Do you guys have dinosaurs in space Walhalla?”

The god of tricks has a pretty mean side-eye. “It’s Asgard. And I am well aware what a dinosaur is. I am not my brother.”

Buffy makes a face. “Well, no. He’s a bit… loud, isn’t he? And very smashy.”

That gets her something that might almost be a smile, if it didn’t have so many teeth. It looks a little mean. Yeah. She kind of smelled the issues on those two from across the briefing room. It’s true, though. There is something very Riley-like about Thor and she is very, very done with that phase, thanks a lot. Buffy has a type and eager to please gym bunnies aren’t it. 

Loki plops the Barneys on pointy sticks and hangs them over their fire, which Buffy lit, thank you very much. Cave Buffy was good for something. Fire bad, but it makes yummy food. 

They sit mostly in silence, occasionally turning their makeshift spits, until the meat looks edible. Buffy plucks off a leg, takes a deep breath and bites into it. 

It’s burnt on the outside, pretty much raw in the inside and tastes like something Cave Buffy wouldn’t have touched. She washes it down with a sip of the water Loki brought back from his excursion in a bowl he somehow made from bark and grass. She’d guess magic, if he didn’t still look half dead. 

Also, she’s absolutely sure, what with how pissed he is, that if he had an ounce of magic left, he’d be using it to zap out of here and leave her to die.

The water tastes silty and metallic and somehow makes it worse. 

It could be worse, she tells herself as she tries not to grimace or gag. They could be freezing to death in an ice dimension right now. 

Deep breath. At least it’s sunny. 

At least it’s sunny. Positive thoughts. Happy thoughts. Sunshine is nice. Sunshine means plants and animals and not freezing to death. Sunshine means dinner. Dinner means survival. 

Survival means – she gags.

+

They have awful food and stale water. They’re not going to die. 

Loki has survival skills, because apparently, gods know stuff. 

That leaves shelter. 

Shelter apparently requires a lot of pink palm fronds. 

From up a tree, thighs burning from clutching to the trunk, ripping down greenery, Buffy calls, “So, just how long do you think it’ll take you to recharge?”

Loki, who is eying her efforts with a sneer, calls back, “Why? Don’t you like it here? You’re the one who landed us in this hospitable place, after all. _It’s so sunny_.”

Okay, so maybe she’s been muttering her new mantra a little too often in the past few days, but he doesn’t need to be so snide. It’s kept her from trying to strangle his sulky ass, so he should be grateful.

She rips another frond loose, aims and drops it. He evades, but still glares at her like a startled cat. She’ll take it. 

+

Loki builds them a hut. She’s pretty sure he’d have built it for himself only, if she hadn’t threatened to bunk with him no matter the size of the thing. 

After that, he made sure to make it as big as he possibly could. Probably scared of catching human cooties, or something. He’s kind of a dick. 

It’s amusing, because for an all-powerful deity, he’s really kind of like a sulky toddler. He sneers and stalks and smirks and mocks, but he never actually does any more than that. 

If what Tony muttered to her between portals is true, that’s how Loki communicates. 

So. She’s just going to treat him like a hot, male Dawnie in the worst of her teens and call it good. 

+

“No, but really,” she tells him, unprompted, from where she’s sprawled out in her underwear, a big leaf over her face for shade, lying in the soft sand. It’s nicely warm, but not yet as hot as it’ll get later. It feels like a heated blanket against her skin. There is a breeze from the ocean, birds are singing, the waves are softly washing at her feet. 

“I’m loving all the sunshine. I’m a California girl and I haven’t had time for a beach vacation in ever. Imagine being stranded here in, like, monsoon season. Or somewhere cold. I hate the cold. I get icicle feet.”

She has no idea if he’s even listening. If he is, he’s probably giving her the stuck-on-my-shoe glare again. 

Buffy doesn’t care. 

It’s sunny. She has food, water, shelter and _no-one wants anything from her_.

She really, really doesn’t care.

+

Okay. 

Revise. Buffy does care.

Buffy, as it just so happens, is sunburnt. 

“Still fond of all the sunshine?” Loki asks from the safety of his palm frond hut, legs crossed under him, still in his leather pants and a linen shirt and wholly _unburnt_.

Buffy glares and moans. Her lips are burned. Talking hurts. 

Loki chuckles. 

It might just be her, but it sounds a little less cutting than usual. Glad someone’s amused. 

Ouch.

+

All whining aside, slayer healing does the job once the sun is down and it cools down enough for her to put her dirty clothes back on and huddle close to their little firepit. 

There’s Barneys stuck between her teeth, she misses her toothbrush like a limb and a shower almost as much. 

But the view is breathtaking. 

Wherever they are has a sky completely different from home. There are two planets looming close enough to look like moons, lighting up the night, and beyond them, a million million stars. 

Eventually, she asks the shadowy figure across the fire (for about the tenth time), “How long do you think we’ll be here?”

“Already tired of your holiday in the sun?” Maybe the atmosphere is getting to him, too, or maybe he’s just tired, but he barely sounds like he wants to skewer her eyeballs and eat them. 

“My friends have to be going nuts by now,” she answers, instead of bickering. “I know that the spell was mostly finished, but one of my girls took a pretty bad hit early on and I don’t know – I need to make sure she’s okay.”

“You knew the spell was completed?” He actually sounds surprised.

She blinks at him through the fire-flicker. “Yeah? I mean, I’ve been around enough mumbo-voodoo stuff to recognize the feel of a spell being finished. It was done, right? It felt done. And the portals were way too frantic for it to only be, like, halftime.”

Because if it wasn’t, if she ripped Loki out of it before it was complete and the portals are still happening _right now_ \- 

“It was finished, or at least my part in it was. All that was left was for the Sorcerer Supreme to direct the energy into the spell he designed.”

She slumps with a dramatic, “Whew.”

“Why did you push me?”

It’s a bit of a change of subject, and also the first thing approaching a decent conversation between them, so it takes Buffy a moment to switch tracks. “What? Why wouldn’t I?”

“The spell was complete.”

She blinks again and maybe the sun got to her more than she thought, because this line of questioning isn’t making much sense. She shrugs. “You were going to end up paste. I try not to let that happen to people. Especially ones that are on my side.”

“Ah, but surely you’re aware that I am no hero.” The mocking edge is back in his voice. 

“I read a few reports along those lines, yeah,” she mocks right back. “But we only fought together that once and we were allies then. Also, for a supposed villain, you haven’t tried to kill me at all yet. Don’t they take away your villain card for stuff like that?”

Plus, Buffy might not like teaming up with superheroes, but she does read the reports every now and then and really, from what she’s found, Loki kind of got the short end of the stick for, like, ever. Dude basically kills himself because shitty parenting, gets rescued, tortured, forced into service via mind control and somehow still manages to weasel his way out and help save the universe from a mad purple giant and somehow _still_ gets called a bad guy. 

Buffy, whose closest friends include a reformed magic addict, a reformed bad slayer, a no-so-reformed vampire and several other willy-nilly breeds of monster who may or may not have colorful pasts, doesn’t really agree with the villain label Loki gets. But that’s just her opinion and, as Giles like to remind her, she gives too many chances.

(He never forgave her for Angel, not deep down. Not really. 

It’s okay. Neither did she.)

Loki gives a little huff that, like everything else he does, seems precisely calculated. The guy is kind of high strung. “I try not to be predictable.”

She’s tempted to call bullshit, because he hasn’t just not been evil, he’s been actively helping and that doesn’t scream supervillain to her. Without him, Buffy wouldn’t have known where to start on the whole survival schtick. She’s a city girl, okay?

But it’s late and the stars are bright, so she just nods. “Yeah, okay.”

+

Something changes, after their weird midnight conversation. Loki still mocks everything she does with a snide ‘But at least it’s sunny’, but when she rolls her eyes, he gives a little smile that’s almost not a smirk at all. 

He also doesn’t go out of his way to stay away from her. Usually, they hang close to each other, even if they don’t talk a lot. 

And, eventually, sometime during week two, they actually start talking, too. 

Little stuff first, and then, somehow, the big things, like siblings and dying and hating the role you’re forced into by old, wise men who think they have any right to your very existence. Being turned into a weapon for someone else to wield. 

It gets heavy, sometimes. 

But there’s a distance between them, a cultural remove, that makes it easy to talk. Like talking to a stranger on a plane. You can tell them everything, because they’re not involved in anything. 

Buffy hasn’t had that in… ever, actually. 

Someone who’ll just listen. 

(“I didn’t want to kill her. I just wanted her to give me her blood. To stop being so… stupid. She threw herself off that roof just to spite me and I was _terrified_ for her.”)

(“I only wanted him to _see me_ , just once, to look at me and see a son worthy of his name.”) 

It’s nice. 

+

“You know,” she tells him, on day twenty-three of their little Cast Away reenactment, “this really isn’t so bad. And not,” she cuts him off sharply as soon as he opens his mouth, “because it’s sunny.”

She rolls onto her stomach in the sand, pillows her head in her arms. “I mean, the food is shitty, the water tastes awful, I am seriously sick of the color pink and there’s stuff I should really be doing but, it’s nice. Peaceful. Quiet.”

She lives in a castle full of teenage girls. Peace and quiet are rare commodities. 

“I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t running full throttle at some disaster or another. And,” she raises her head, grins a little. “The company isn’t too awful, either.”

A sniff. “Tolerable, at best.”

“High praise, Prince of the Palm Fronds.”

“How do you humans say, ah, yes, bite me.”

“Not before the third date.”

He leans back onto his hand, face turned into the sun. “Well, I do suppose it could be worse. At least it _is_ sunny.” 

Buffy laughs.

+

On day thirty-five, Loki wakes her by looming over her in the noon sun until his shadow makes her chilly and announces, “I am recovered. We can return.”

Thirty seconds later, Buffy’s on her feet, fully dressed, the crooked shell necklace she made out of boredom in hand. 

“Let’s go.”

She can almost smell the burger and fries she’ll have after her hour-long shower. 

Loki takes her hand, pulls her closer and asks, “Where to?”

“Honestly?”

“Quite.”

“Somewhere rainy, please. I’m sick of the sun.”

He laughs.

Then they’re gone. 

+


End file.
